All events are held in the program’s Greenwich Village home, the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, unless otherwise noted
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
The New York University Creative Writing Program’s Spring 2023 Reading Series continues in February and March with events featuring Hafizah Augustus Geter (Feb. 23), Eileen Myles (Feb. 24), and Brenda Shaughnessy (Mar. 23), among others.
All events are held in the program’s Greenwich Village home, the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, located at 58 W. 10th Street (between 5th and 6th Aves.) unless otherwise noted, and are free and open to the public. Attendees should be prepared to show a government-issued ID and proof of COVID-19 vaccination and booster. An RSVP is required (see links below) and seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, call 212.998.8816 or visit its website.
Thursday, February 23, 7 p.m.
Nonfiction Reading: Hafizah Augustus Geter
RSVP
Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian U.S. writer born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of the memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin (Random House, 2022) and a collection of poetry Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020).
Friday, February 24, 7 p.m.
We Killed the Moon: A Poetry Podcast Event
RSVP
Matthew Tuckner is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at NYU, where he is poetry editor of Washington Square Review and teaches in the Undergraduate Writing Program. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Colorado Review, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, Bennington Review, Bat City Review, Image, New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, and Sixth Finch, among others.
DeeSoul Carson is a poet, performer, and educator whose most recent chapbook, Running From Streetlights (2020), is a meditation on Blackness and being in America.
Bernard Ferguson, a Bahamian poet and essayist, is currently working on a book of nonfiction, The Climate Sirens (Graywolf, 2024), about Hurricane Dorian, the effects of climate change on small-island developing states, and how centuries of injustices have come to cause the climate crisis.
Erin Perez is a poet who works across other mediums, such as ceramics, photography, and painting. A recent graduate from the Pratt Institute BFA, she is from Panamá City, Panamá and currently lives in Brooklyn.
Tariq Thompson is a Black poet from Memphis whose poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, wildness, underblong, Sixth Finch, the Academy of American Poets, and the Adroit Journal, where he received the 2020 Adroit Prize for Poetry. His chapbook of poetry, LONE LILY, explores Black history as a remedy for loneliness.
Eileen Myles is a poet, novelist, and art journalist whose publications include Pathetic Literature (2022), an edited volume, along with the fictional works Chelsea Girls (1994), Cool for You (2000), Inferno (2010), and Afterglow (2017). Myles has also penned The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009), along with books of poetry that include Evolution (2018), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, and a “Working Life” (Spring 2023).
Friday, March 3, 5 p.m.
NYU CWP Open Mic Night
RSVP
Come see current NYU MFA creative writing students read from their work.
Thursday, March 23, 7 p.m.
Fiction and Poetry Reading: Idra Novey, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Monica Youn
RSVP
Idra Novey’s novel Take What You Need was published by Viking Books in 2023. She is the author of Those Who Knew and Ways to Disappear. Her poetry collections include Exit, Civilian, The Next Country, and Clarice: The Visitor, a collaboration with the artist Erica Baum. Her fiction and poetry have been translated into a dozen languages and she’s written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, New York Magazine, and the Paris Review.
Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of six poetry collections, including Tanya (Penguin, 2023), LIQUID FLESH: New & Selected Poems (2022, Bloodaxe Books), The Octopus Museum (2019, Knopf), So Much Synth (2016, Copper Canyon Press), and Our Andromeda (2012, Copper Canyon), which was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, the International Griffin Prize, and the PEN Open Book Award.
Monica Youn is the author of From From (Graywolf Press, 2023), Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016), Barter (Graywolf Press, 2003), and Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Magazine.
Friday, March 24, 5 p.m.
Alumni Reading: Rebekah Anderson, Sidik Fofana, Dionne Ford, Paul Hlava Ceballos, and Rachel Mannheimer.
RSVP
Rebekah Anderson is a 2007 Fiction MFA graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Her debut novel, The Grand Promise, began as her thesis project with advisor E.L. Doctorow. At NYU, Anderson also worked with Jayne Anne Phillips and Irini Spanidou, served as managing editor for Washington Square Review, and taught courses on creative writing, humanities, and composition.
Sidik Fofana is a graduate of NYU’s MFA program and a public school teacher in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in the Sewanee Review and Granta. Stories from the Tenants Downstairs, his debut short story collection composed of eight narratives about residents of a fictional building in Harlem, was published by Scribner in August 2022.
Dionne Ford is author of the forthcoming memoir Go Back and Get It (Bold Type Books, April, 2023) and co-editor of the anthology Slavery's Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and a BA from Fordham University where she teaches creative writing.
Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of banana [ ] (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. His chapbook, Banana [ ] / we pilot the blood (3rd Thing Press, 2021), is a collaboration with Quenton Baker, Christina Sharpe, and Torkwase Dyson. His work has been published in Poetry Magazine, Pleiades, Triquarterly, Poetry Northwest, BOMB, and Narrative Magazine, among other journals and newspapers.
Rachel Mannheimer, a literary scout and as a senior editor for the Yale Review, is the author of Earth Room, which was selected by Louise Glück as the inaugural winner of the Bergman Prize and published by Changes in April 2022.
Thursday, March 30, 7 p.m.
Songs of Earth: Poetry and Music with Yusef Komunyakaa and Paul Muldoon
Note Location: Rosenthal Pavilion at NYU Kimmel Center, 60 Washington Square South
RSVP
Award-winning poets Yusef Komunyakaa and Paul Muldoon will read their work with musical accompaniment.
Yusef Komunyakaa’s numerous books of poems include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999; Talking Dirty to the Gods; Thieves of Paradise; Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems 1977-1989; and most recently, The Emperor of Water Clocks. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Award, and the Bronze Star for his service in Vietnam.
Paul Muldoon is the author of a number of poetry collections, including New Selected Poems: 1968-1994 (1996), Hay (1998), Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, Horse Latitudes (2006), One Thousand Things Worth Knowing (2015), Selected Poems 1968-2014 (2016), and Frolic and Detour (2019). He has also published collections of criticism, children’s books, opera libretti, song lyrics, and works for radio and television.
Friday, March 31, 5 p.m.
Regarding Ingres: A Reading
RSVP
A reading by contributors to Regarding Ingres: Fourteen Stories, an anthology of newly commissioned texts from the NYU Creative Writing Program MFA students that pay homage to Jean-August-Dominique Ingres’s Comtesse d’Haussonville. With opening remarks by Darin Strauss, faculty adviser for the project and author of the book’s introduction, and Michaelyn Mitchell, editor-in-chief of the Frick Collection.
Darin Strauss is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than it Hurts You, the memoir Half a Life, and most recently the acclaimed novel, The Queen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story (Random House, 2020).
Friday, March 31, 7 p.m.
Emerging Writers Reading Series at KGB: Haytham el-Wardany
Note Location: The Red Room at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street
RSVP
The Emerging Writers Reading Series features MFA students from a mix of genres reading alongside a headlining author. The evening’s headliner is Haytham el-Wardany.
Haytham el-Wardany is an Egyptian writer and translator who writes short stories and experimental prose. His latest book, Banat Awa and The Missing Letters, came out in Arabic in January 2023. His other works include The Book of Sleep (Al-Karma 2017, Seagull Books 2020, by Robin Moger) and How to Disappear (Kayfa ta, 2013-2017).